Recently in Patient Satisfaction Category

Nobody likes bad reviews. Especially health care delivery or service organizations. Because bad press means customers (patients, referring physicians, etc.) will think we are unsafe or unfriendly. And it will surely lead to lawsuits, regulatory intervention, loss of competitive positioning, etc. Especially if it's online. Well maybe there's another side to this story - at least if you believe the lessons of The Upside Of Bad Online Customer Reviews which appeared on Forbes.com August 4, 2009. This short piece by Mirela Iverac, a frequent Forbes contributor, is a provocative read for those health care leaders who might be willing to consider the other side of conventional wisdom on this point...

A few months ago, this blog commented on a short piece about the use of ethnography as a strategic tool (Try Ethnography for Health Care Strategy). The source article had been a short, theoretical, and perhaps even whimsical exploration of the use of anthropologists in developing business strategy. Well, along comes Business Week on June 24 with "How to Kick off an Innovation Project" by Jessie Scanlon which gets practical really fast in describing how Office Max used ethnography to do an image turnaround - complete with a "how to" guide. It struck me then, and now, that there are valuable pearls for health care leaders here...

Don't Wait to Innovate by Dev Patnaik and Peter Mortensen of Jump Associates is a short column about improvements at a disability claims processor that appeared in the online edition of Business Week on April 27. It was touted as an example of the potential power of innovation for enhancing performance in an already successful business. How could this be relevant to real health care? Well, I saw it completely differently. It was really all about how injecting humanity into a business resulted in decreasing resource use and liability - thereby enhancing customer satisfaction, decreasing costs, and increasing profitability. Sound like outcomes we could use in health care? Read on...

The April 2009 issue of Harvard Business Review arrived this weekend and I devoured it on the plane yesterday. There were so many provocative pieces for health care leaders that I decided to bundle several of the short ones into this commentary. They all happen to take contrarian views to "common management wisdom" - on such "no brainers" as the value of employee satisfaction, the wisdom of following the path set by "best of breed" organizations, and the degree to which organizations gain replicable competency from the alliances they create. If the conventional wisdom found in the management literature is actually wrong, how are we to learn leadership skills and techniques from those who came before us...

In Southwest Airlines CEO Flies Uncharted Skies March 25, The Wall Street Journal's Mike Esterl takes a look at how Southwest Airlines - the perennially successful low cost airline - plans to fly above the industry clouds. As you might expect, it's not by using strategies the other airlines use. What's interesting for health care leaders about SWA's approach is not so much what it is, but what it is not...

Everyone's abuzz about the Tata Nano. The world's cheapest car is taking India, and the world, by storm. Leveraging the wundercar's impending launch, Business Week (on March 18, 2009) asked the critical question in its eponymous article: What Can Tata's Nano Teach Detroit? I immediately tried to leverage their question to your advantage - so I began to wonder about what the Nano can teach health care leaders...

Executives Have No Idea What Customers Want, by Andrea J. Ayers, President of Customer Management for Convergys - a company that specializes in customer relationship management - appeared on Forbes.com on March 10. It's a bold assertion based on a sobering survey conducted by Convergys across 10 industries revealing that: "Nearly half of consumers (47%) say they don't believe company executives understand their experiences...More than one-third (41%) of the customers who take the time to complain don't think companies listen to or act on their feedback.... [of these] more than half will defect--leaving a company flatly--based on bad customer experiences, without ever telling the company why." Overall, she claims that: "17% of [all customer] interactions result in a customer leaving the company..." Is health care an exception. I doubt it. This is something health care leaders could do something about...